Page:On the Revision of the Confession of Faith.djvu/30

22 Assembly was possible, when the Church was still under the happy influence of a marvellous revival, when the Word of God was felt as a living, quickening, transforming power, and preached not as a tradition, but as the very power and wisdom of God, by men of ripe scholarship and devoted piety, who have remained our models of earnest preaching and our guides in practical godliness, even unto this day."

The English Reformation was from the beginning Augustinian; and it was the Anglo-Catholic irruption which first broke its cordial relations with the other Reformed Churches as well as its internal harmony. The doctrinal (as distinguished from the more pressing ecclesiastical) object for which the Westminster Assembly was called together and to the subserving of which it addressed itself, was the twofold one of vindicating the Protestant soundness of the Church of England before the general body of the Reformed Churches, as well as the restoration of its internal harmony and the institution of a doctrinal uniformity with the Church of Scotland. Catholicity and harmony were, therefore, its key-notes. Of course there was no intention of embracing the errors of Romanism, or of Arminianism, or of Prelacy; these were the causes and occasions of all the difficulties which the English Church had had to suffer. But its formularies were meant to be as broad and catholic as the accepted theology of the Reformation would permit; and it was hoped that by its labors all true Protestants in Britain might be united in defense of the sum and substance of the doctrine of the Reformed Churches. "If its members," says Dr. Mitchell advisedly, "had one idea more dominant than another, it was not, as they are sometimes still caricatured, that of setting forth with greater